About the Book
In 1974, women in a feminist consciousness-raising group in Eugene, Oregon, formed a mock organization called the Ladies Sewing Circle and Terrorist Society. Emblazoning its logo onto t-shirts, the group wryly envisioned female collective textile making as a practice that could upend conventions, threaten state structures, and wreak political havoc. Elaborating on this example as a prehistory to the more recent phenomenon of “craftivism”—the politics and social practices associated with handmaking—Fray explores textiles and their role at the forefront of debates about process, materiality, gender, and race in times of economic upheaval.
Closely examining how amateurs and fine artists in the United States and Chile turned to sewing, braiding, knotting, and quilting amid the rise of global manufacturing, Julia Bryan-Wilson argues that textiles unravel the high/low divide and urges us to think flexibly about what the politics of textiles might be. Her case studies from the 1970s through the 1990s—including the improvised costumes of the theater troupe the Cockettes, the braided rag rugs of US artist Harmony Hammond, the thread-based sculptures of Chilean artist Cecilia Vicuña, the small hand-sewn tapestries depicting Pinochet’s torture, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt—are often taken as evidence of the inherently progressive nature of handcrafted textiles. Fray, however, shows that such methods are recruited to often ambivalent ends, leaving textiles very much “in the fray” of debates about feminized labor, protest cultures, and queer identities; the malleability of cloth and fiber means that textiles can be activated, or stretched, in many ideological directions.
The first contemporary art history book to discuss both fine art and amateur registers of handmaking at such an expansive scale, Fray unveils crucial insights into how textiles inhabit the broad space between artistic and political poles—high and low, untrained and highly skilled, conformist and disobedient, craft and art.
About the Author :
Julia Bryan-Wilson is associate professor of modern and contemporary art at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Art Workers: Radical Practice in the Vietnam War Era and coauthor of Art in the Making: Artists and Their Materials from the Studio to Crowdsourcing.
Review :
"Fray, Julia Bryan-Wilson's brilliant and compelling new book, explores how political worlds are made and unmade through craft. Her research and analysis of the 'hand-made' objects of feminist, queer, trans, and Global South artists and activists reveals alternative forms of knowing, imagining and crafting in exquisite detail. Astonishing!"-- "Macarena Gomez-Barris, Pratt Institute"
"Julia Bryan-Wilson sees us all as experts in the field of textiles--they are with us throughout our lives; 'we all have, ' she writes, 'a profound relationship to them.' . . . .The political impact that textiles have on us is strongly felt in Bryan-Wilson's examination of the AIDS quilt. This section is an immersive insight into the socio-economic impact that the American political system had on people living with AIDS in the 1980s."
-- "Contemporary and America Latina"
"Fray is a compelling study that is a pleasure to read, as Bryan-Wilson deftly weaves her rigorous research findings into a clearly articulated account of the ways textiles hold in tension the categories of art and craft while lending texture to the political concerns they reference"-- "Winterthur Portfolio"
"A clear and specific historian, she charts the ways in which art can ignite social change through its political and humanitarian commitments. . . . Bryan-Wilson's book is especially timely, a critical primer on the exigencies and urgencies of artistic resistance and community building."
-- "Art Journal"
"Academically well-researched, critically insightful, and bolstered by dozens of historic photos, from braided floor pieces to Chilean arpillera tapestries to the AIDS quilt, the case for using handwork to illustrate and raise consciousness about oppression is well documented in Fray. What often comes to the fore is the power of people sewing and crafting together to draw attention to common concerns."-- "Notions"
"At its heart, Fray is an examination of the sorts of political insights gained, quite literally, from setting your hands to work. More than a book about textiles, Fray is a varied survey of what it feels like to try one's hand at making another world possible--a critical project that focuses on a set of undeniably haptic works of art and material culture, aided by the author's personal commitment to continually 'measure her own reach, ' as a critic. . . . Bryan-Wilson challenges herself, and her readers, to consider the kinds of political entanglements that the situated work of making, handling, wearing, and caring for fabrics can activate."-- "Criticism"
"Bryan-Wilson nimbly unravels enduring assumptions about textile practices and the proper subjects of art-historical analysis."
-- "Burlington Magazine"
"Bryan-Wilson's Fray: Art and Textile Politics serves as a potent reminder that the centrality of textile--and textile techniques--to creative practice, whether art or design, is not new, nor is it restricted to 'high' art and culture. . . . this volume makes a profound contribution to studies of craft, art, gender and sexuality, and the inherent politics of making. It provides a powerful case for a further critique of the conventional high/low binary that structures many discussions of both art and craft."-- "Journal of Design History"
"Discussions of textiles and politics are generally infused with passion and urgency but rarely receive the serious analytic thought they deserve. Bryan-Wilson does both, and the field is in her debt for the remarkable research and wonderful writing that make Fray a special and rewarding read and a prize-winning contribution to the history of modernism."-- "Art Bulletin"
"In Fray, Julia Bryan-Wilson explores how political worlds are made and unmade through craft. She patches together the neglected histories of the 'handmade' objects of feminist, queer, trans, and Latin American artists and activists and reveals alternative forms of making in exciting and focused detail. It is a vast and ambitious book with rigorous research promising to expand conceptions of textiles and identity politics both geographically and thematically."-- "Selvedge"
"In the virtuosity of its reading practice and archive, Fray intervenes in fields of several stripes. Readers interested in the history and politics of craft, in contemporary art, in institutional histories of galleries and artistic production, in histories of globalization and neoliberal marketplaces, in the relationships between Chile and the U.S. in the late 20 century, in queer culture and counter-cultures, in art's relationship to governance and international politics, and in contemporary 'craftivism' will all find much to think with in this important book."-- "InVisible Culture"
